In a post-industrial Connecticut town, nineteen-year-old Hai is stopped from jumping off a bridge by Grazina, an elderly widow with dementia. He becomes her caretaker, and over the course of a year their unlikely friendship reshapes his sense of family, identity, and belonging. The novel traces memory, loss, and the quiet ways connection can offer a second chance.

Bread of Angels is a lyrical memoir by Patti Smith that traces her life from a working‑class childhood into young adulthood as she discovers poetry, music, and the impulse to create. It follows her relationships, marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, and the building of a family and home, while also facing loss and the long return to writing. Through vivid memories and reflective scenes, the book explores art, imagination, grief, and renewal without revealing key plot details.

Perfect Victims is a lyrical, urgent collection of reportage, personal testimony, and historical reflection that bears witness to Palestinian life under occupation. Mohammed El-Kurd combines candid memoir and on-the-ground reporting to insist on Palestinian dignity, resistance, and the demand to be seen as human without requiring a performance of ‘‘perfect’’ victimhood.

Hala Alyan’s memoir follows her path to motherhood through surrogacy and how that choice forces her to confront infertility, marital strain, and the legacy of her family’s exile. As she revisits memories of Beirut and stories passed down from previous generations, she pieces together questions of identity, belonging, and what it means to make a home for herself and her child.

True Mistakes is a debut poetry collection in which Lena Moses‑Schmitt examines consciousness, identity, and time through moments of daily life—walking, painting, working—and the emotional terrain of grief, anxiety, and joy. The poems probe the boundary between art and reality, often reflecting on paintings as a way to explore memory and selfhood, and reframe misperceptions or errors as openings for imagination rather than failure.

Night Watch is a poetry collection that examines personal and American life through themes of family, loss, renewal, and resilience. A central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightingale,” imagines the voices and shared identity of nineteenth-century conjoined performers Millie-Christine McCoy; another cycle, “Darkling,” responds to Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings and Dante’s Inferno to explore loneliness, companionship, and cultural critique. The poems blend music, humor, and elegiac reflection without revealing specific plot details.

Set against the backdrop of ancient Greece, this narrative delves into the life of a woman whose beauty sparked one of the most legendary wars in history. The story intricately weaves together myth and history, exploring the complexities of love, power, and destiny. Through vivid storytelling, the reader is transported to a world where gods and mortals intertwine, and the choices of one woman have far-reaching consequences. The tale captures the essence of human emotion and the timeless struggle between duty and desire, offering a fresh perspective on a classic legend.

In a quaint neighborhood filled with charm and mystery, a young woman grapples with the complexities of love, loss, and self-discovery. As she navigates the intricacies of her relationships and the secrets hidden within her community, she finds solace and inspiration in the poetic beauty of her surroundings. Through a series of poignant encounters and introspective moments, she learns to embrace her true self and the vibrant tapestry of life that unfolds around her.

In late-1980s France, poet–psychologist Jon-Perse acquires an early computer and, with his Uzbek translation partner Abdulhamid Ismail, feeds it fragments of Persian poetry. The resulting program that both analyzes and generates text becomes the catalyst for a multilingual, postmodern meditation on authorship, translation, and how history, philosophy and longing are refracted through human and digital minds.

The Appalachian Sea is a collection of poems that inhabits the landscapes and livelihoods of the Shenandoah region, blending everyday work, memory, and the uncanny. Drawing on gothic imagery—haints, dark orchards, wandering ghosts—and the constant flow of rivers, the poems meditate on mortality, change, and the stubborn persistence that makes a home both beloved and strange.

Dead Girl Cameo is a poetic collection in which m. mick powell interweaves memories of queer Black girlhood with reimagined lives of music icons—Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Phyllis Hyman, Selena, and others—to explore sexuality, survival, and queer mourning. Through sensual imagery, speculative verse, and lyric wordplay, the poems meditate on loss, friendship, love, and the afterlives of stardom, imagining how these women’s stories shape possibility and resilience.

Groceries is a book-length poem that explores our fraught relationship with objects—how we obtain, name, keep, and discard them. Mixing everyday items (fax machines, horseshoes, waves) with broader ecological questions, it acts as a lyrical guide for listening to and speaking with the material world, considering how objects shape personal and collective futures.

A formally daring collection of poems that reimagines Black life across time through speculative, Afrofuturist lenses, blending fragmented syntax, sonic performance, and visual play to collapse past, present, and future while interrogating language, identity, embodiment, and the social forces that shape how histories and possibilities are imagined.

A dreamlike, poetic reimagining of Jamaica that moves between present-day life and deep historical memory. Told as a mosaic of voices—a mother searching for a missing child, an undocumented migrant, a youth wandering dream-gates—the book explores loss, cultural memory, and ecological decline, with evocative notes on healing herbs, disappearing flora and fauna, and sea spirits. Objects like Zora Neale Hurston’s abandoned camera and rich, cinematic imagery anchor the collection’s eco-spiritual visions without revealing plot twists.

A collection of intimate, conversational poems that follow a speaker from their twenties into their thirties, moving between cities and rural towns while examining patriotism, identity, family history, sex, race, womanhood, addiction and sobriety, consumerism, and pop culture. Personal anecdotes and observations — including a memory of a grandmother who left Virginia and settled in Connecticut — are used to explore the performed self and small, telling moments of everyday life.

Ocean of Clouds is a collection of long-lined poems that meditate on coastlines, tidepools, skylines, and ancestral memory. Through vivid seaside imagery and quiet everyday moments—waiting for a ferry, listening to records, watching a child in sunlight—Garrett Hongo explores perception, gratitude, and the effort to keep memories alive without revealing narrative details or plot.

Collected Poems gathers Wendy Cope’s work across her career, bringing together well-known and previously uncollected pieces. With wit, formal skill and accessible language, the poems explore everyday human experiences—love, heartbreak, disappointment and small moments of joy—often with playful forms and clear emotional insight. This edition also includes Nick Garland’s illustrations for “The River Girl.”

After a sudden diagnosis of a rare, aggressive cancer, Amanda Quaid’s ordinary life — marriage, work, and parenting — is upended. Written as a memoir-in-verse, No Obvious Distress uses candid, inventive poems to make sense of pain, desire, motherhood, and mortality, and to explore how creativity and love persist amid uncertainty.

At the grand Rosecliff estate, Phoenix, a hardworking gardener, finds herself drawn into the private world of Marguerite Gray, a famously influential designer, and her reserved husband. An unexpected incident brings Phoenix closer to the couple, stirring jealousy and putting her career and reputation at risk. When a sudden tragedy triggers an investigation, Phoenix’s hidden past and the tensions around Rosecliff threaten to upend everything she’s worked for.

Built in Sweden in 1979 and known by many names, one barge serves as troop barracks, a floating jail, and temporary factory housing as it moves through shifting jurisdictions. Following the Vessel’s changing roles and registrations, Empty Vessel uses this single object to explore offshore flags, modular shipping, and market-driven policies that reshape labor, law, and everyday lives across borders—offering a compact, spoiler-free look at globalization’s human and legal effects.

An engrossing study that interweaves a biography of a singular Southern poet with close readings of his work, tracing how his rural roots, personal mythmaking, and turbulent inner life shaped a distinctive, visionary voice. The book reconstructs his life—family, travels, influences—and situates his major long poem and lyric sequences within themes of landscape, memory, violence, and longing, while examining stylistic innovations, narrative lyricism, and religious and folkloric echoes. It also addresses the circumstances and impact of his early death, the cultivation of his posthumous reputation, and the ways his work challenges and enriches American poetic traditions.

This Unruly Witness gathers essays, poems, letters, and interviews that explore poet-activist June Jordan’s life, work, and influence. Contributors reflect on her roles as poet, healer, and organizer, showing how her writing continues to inspire community, love, and resistance.

Adam Plunkett combines close readings of Robert Frost’s poems with biographical investigation to reassess Frost’s life and key relationships—particularly his fraught friendship with biographer Lawrance Thompson. The book traces how Frost’s tensions between privacy and intimacy shaped his poetry, offering a fresh, concise interpretation without revealing plot details.